


Tea For Two, and Two For Tea

by HarveyWallbanger



Series: You're Part of the Life I've Never Had [2]
Category: Gotham (TV)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Disturbing Themes, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-31
Updated: 2018-07-31
Packaged: 2019-06-19 14:07:47
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,638
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15511530
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HarveyWallbanger/pseuds/HarveyWallbanger
Summary: An heir and a spare.





	Tea For Two, and Two For Tea

**Author's Note:**

> This story takes place after the events of "No Tears For the Creatures of the Night," but it's not necessary to have read it for this to make sense.  
> I am not involved in the production of Gotham, and this school is not involved in the production of Gotham. No one pays me to do this. This story and the work it's based upon are fiction. Do not try any of this at home. Thank you, and good night.

When he goes out at night, he’s always looking for something. He was before, but, now, it’s sort of… shy. He almost has to be shy, but around himself. Isn’t that silly? Jeremiah’s not two people, no matter what anyone might say, might have said. It’s not being shy if it’s with yourself.  
It’s hiding.  
But it’s hiding in a fun way. It’s like playing a game with himself. If he doesn’t admit it, it’s almost as though he has to guess; has to wait until he figures it out- No, until he remembers. When he goes out, it’s like he’s unconscious, half-asleep, or falling asleep, and then, he remembers what he wants.  
And he’s awake.  
This way, if he doesn’t find it, and he doesn’t find it, and he doesn’t find it, for days, or weeks, or months, there’s no reason to be disappointed. It was just a dream that ended. When he falls asleep again, he’ll have another dream. Then, one night, he’ll wake up, and the dream will come true. Until that night, there are things to do. It’s been a long time since he had a big plan, and to tell the truth, big plans are sort of redundant, now. He’s created a laboratory, and now, it’s time to play around, almost idly, waiting for something interesting to happen on its own, or almost on its own. Sometimes, it’s fun just to watch what others do. Cobblepot’s set up his own little kingdom, like a model train set; a real working world in miniature. Crane’s always fussing away at something, he and his friend with the hat giggling like a couple of school kids whenever Jeremiah happens upon them. The others are more retiring. Jeremiah just finds the bodies; charred or frozen or hacked to pieces. There are certain places in the city, he finds, to his amusement, where it’s just not safe for him to go. He has to ask Ecco to survey them on his behalf, and even she’s not really safe, because everyone knows who she’s with.  
“Have the man-haters tried to recruit you yet?” he asks her.  
“I told them to wait until Christmas, when they get a toaster,” she answers in her cold, flat voice, and he almost asks her if she’s serious, but bites the inside of his cheek instead. Of course she isn’t serious.  
“You could make a lot of money,” he continues, circling her as her eyes grow increasingly bright with amusement, “Live the high life, among your own kind. Impress all the lucky ladies.”  
“Who says I want the high life?” she asks, “Who says I want to shit where I eat?”  
Then, he just leaves it alone. When she isn’t there, he doesn’t know what to do. When she is, he feels like she looks at him too much. It’s better if he doesn’t push or pull. Ecco’s like a toy, one that never acts as you’d expect. What winds her up, Jeremiah’s never really known, but it isn’t he. All he has to do is watch her go. All he has to do is let her act, and then react. The price for a totally organic experience is uncertainty. She went away a week ago, and he hasn’t heard anything since. If he goes out tonight, it’s to look for her. He’ll pay some streetwalker to sniff around the Sirens’ place, and tell him what she knows. That’s what he’ll do.  
He’ll get there eventually. The nights are long. The year is fading, so the days are more night than day. Dusk is a brief tickling caress before the darkness swoops down and swallows all. You don’t have to rush, not when the night is like velvet trickling around you. A thousand touches from a hand gloved in velvet. It’s quiet, on this particular night, the way that it sometimes is, now. Even monsters get tired and have to rest. Sometimes, he wonders how long it can go on. It’s the vampire problem: suck the world dry like you long to, and you’ll have nothing left to eat. One day, all of the normals will be dead, and the monsters will turn on each other. It may have already begun. Some of the charred remains are still recognizable. Small-time criminals who thought that they were tough, but couldn’t bargain with raw element. One of the rumors is that when Cobblepot wants one of his employees disposed of, he sends them on an errand in the wrong part of town. That sounds overly-complicated to Jeremiah, which means that it’s something that Cobblepot would probably do. It’s well-known that he supplies Mr. Freeze with test subjects for his experiments, but whether or not Freeze works for the Penguin, or if the Penguin actually, secretly, works for Freeze, no one can say. Crane will prey on anything that thinks, that fears. The Sirens will shoot anything that pisses standing up. There are others, too, beasts, or as good as, who kill without reason. One day, Gotham will be silent for good.  
There’s a figure dragging itself down the street, along a shabby fence. Jeremiah sees the shadow before he sees the body that makes it; for a moment, it seems as though the shadow is the animate matter. A piece of the night sky that’s fallen to earth. It’ll flap back up to the heavens like a bat. Of course, it stays earthbound, and Jeremiah follows, just to see what it’s attached to. The sick don’t last long. The injured go sooner. It could be one of the creatures, the half-human, the inhuman. Those are always interesting.  
The figure stops at an oil drum fire left burning, an incongruous sign of life on an otherwise dead street, like a wound on a corpse that still gushes blood for a little bit longer. That’s when Jeremiah sees. His hair is long, unkempt- a wig?- a disguise?- a game?- a game he plays with himself?- and he needs a shave, but the bones of the face, the line of forehead and nose, the set of the mouth are unmistakable. It’s Bruce. Is it? As Jeremiah gets closer, he begins to wonder. Bruce is thin, he’s gaunt, he’s haggard. It’s been months since Jeremiah saw him last, but could this much damage be done so quickly? When Bruce looks up, his eyes are strange. Too flat, but too bright, like an animal’s. Like an animal, he pulls back into himself.  
“Stay away,” Bruce says.  
Jeremiah smiles. “Is that any way to greet an old friend?”  
“I don’t have any friends,” Bruce says, not bitterly, but sort of confused. It must be a game. It’s a silly game, but now that it’s dark all the time, and on a quiet night, playing silly games is the best amusement there is.  
“No? No friends at all? Not your domestic? Not your little paramour?”  
He frowns, chewing his lower lip. “Alfred,” he says slowly, “and Selina. You mean Selina.”  
“How is she? I meant to ask you the last time, but of course, we had more important things on our minds.”  
“I don’t know.” Does he look guilty?  
“I’d think you’d want to be by her side as she recovers. Or does she blame you? You didn’t see her, did you, didn’t happen to confess to an indiscretion, perhaps, and that’s why you’re out in the cold?”  
“I haven’t seen her in a long time,” he says in a hard voice.  
“Oh? Why’s that?”  
“She doesn’t want to see me. I’m supposed to be dead, anyway.”  
“That’s interesting. Dead of what, of a broken heart?”  
Bruce looks up at the sky, and then at Jeremiah. “I was dying. I was told that I would die. But then I didn’t. I don’t know why. Who are you, anyway?”  
Jeremiah can play. “I’m your best friend, Bruce; I’ve told you that before.”  
“No, you’re not. I wasn’t told about you.” Slowly, intently, he looks Jeremiah over, turning his head from side to side. “You look familiar. You look sort of like Jerome Valeska. He tried to kill Bruce twice; once, at the Children’s Hospital fundraiser a few years ago, and once, at the circus.”  
Jeremiah finds himself huffing out a breath in frustration. “There is still some resemblance, I suppose.”  
A strange look passes over Bruce’s face, and he asks again, slowly, as though forming the words with great difficulty, “Who are you? Why do you look like him?”  
“He was my brother,” Jeremiah says, not concealing his annoyance, seeing no point.  
“Brother. I didn’t know he had a brother.”  
Jeremiah rolls his eyes. “I convinced our mother that Jerome had tried to kill me, she sent me away to a boarding school that my father paid for, and I lived as a recluse under an assumed name for more than a decade with the help of your father and a friend of mine from school.”  
“My father,” Bruce says with a far-away look in his eyes.  
“I was one of his good causes. He was impressed by my undergraduate work, and when he learned of my unique situation, he had his lawyers wipe my name from the state and city records, and made it possible for me to work as an architect without having to enter into the public eye.”  
“You’re sure that you’re Jerome’s brother.”  
“Bruce,” he says gently, “this is getting old.”  
“I’m not Bruce,” he says with a fierce and determined sort of sadness.  
“Oh? Then, who are you? Does Bruce have a twin brother, too? Are you his doppelganger?”  
“I was made in a lab, in Indian Hill.” He turns around, lifts his hair and pulls down his shirt collar. In the light of the fire, Jeremiah sees the suggestion of a scar between his shoulderblades, long and perfectly straight.  
“Is that supposed to mean something to me?”  
“It’s where they applied bone marrow grafts treated with Bruce Wayne’s DNA, to turn me into him. I have them all over my body. I used to have more, but they got rid of some of them, to make me look more like him.”  
“And where did you hear all of this? You didn’t come with an owner’s manual, did you?”  
“I met some other people from Indian Hill, out here,” Bruce looks around at nothing, “and they explained what I didn’t understand. Most of the people who escaped died, but some of them didn’t.”  
This, at least, has a whiff of truth about it. Upon examination, Jeremiah finds that he doesn’t really care about that. His interest is pushed out by something else. Is this what people felt, looking at him when they knew that Jerome existed? This sense of de ja vu, disorientation, even vertigo; as though one’s eyes warned of danger, but could only be half-believed? People react strangely to twins: you think you know what you’re seeing, but you don’t. They want to believe that it’s as simple as the constituents of one person spread across two bodies; that there must be some deficit of mind or, stupidly, of the soul. That you must feel as one body, like a dumb animal brain; like something that lacks sense and is only nerve and blood. The way they looked at you, which now, Jeremiah is old enough to understand, like a walking science experiment, like something to jostle and prod for the fun of seeing it twitch. Too loudly, he breathes out through his nose.  
“Come home with me.”  
“Why?”  
“You’re not safe out here.”  
“Nowhere’s safe,” Bruce- is he also ‘Bruce’?- says.  
“What’s your name?”  
“I don’t have one. They gave me a number. I don’t even remember it anymore.”  
“What do people call you, then?”  
“They don’t call me anything.”  
This is absurd. “For my convenience, then, I’ll call you Bruce.”  
Bruce says nothing, merely looks at him. It’s like trying to pick up an incompetent hooker.  
“Are you hungry?” Jeremiah asks, “Cold?”  
“Yes,” he says, almost sulkily, as though offended by the question, as though the answer should be obvious.  
“So, come with me, and don’t be anymore. I’m not going to hurt you,” Jeremiah adds, though he can’t even be sure that this is true.  
“You can’t hurt me,” Bruce says, “No one can.”  
“Then what do you have to fear?”  
Bruce looks around, again, at nothing, then shrugs, and follows Jeremiah.  
It’s not a game. It’s something else. It’s so impossible and so strange, though, that what it might actually be ceases to matter. Jeremiah’s shocked at his own lack of inquisitiveness. He’s almost ashamed. He’s glad that Ecco’s away. He’s glad that the streets are empty, and the night is long and quiet. He gives Bruce his privacy, lets him take a long bath and change his clothes. They eat dinner in silence. When that’s done, he tells Bruce that Bruce can sleep in his bed, and leads Bruce to his bedroom. He leaves Bruce standing there, in the middle of the room. Even though he’s not tired, he turns off the light and lies down on the couch.  
What makes a person?  
That’s such a stupid thing to think about.  
That person in the other room isn’t Bruce Wayne. He may look like him, but he doesn’t sound like him, doesn’t move like him, doesn’t think like him. Maybe, in a way, that’s better. Bruce’s willfulness is exciting, but it makes things so difficult. His double has the same contrary streak, but he seems to be more obliging. More than that, if he’s to be believed, he’s completely alone in the world. Human beings aren’t interchangeable parts, Jeremiah thinks angrily. It’s old anger, anger he doesn’t want to feel, so he lets it flatten and fade. No, they are not. Form follows function, though, and maybe, this Bruce is meant to be an improvement on the other. Even thinking that feels traitorous, somehow. No. It’s not a matter of improving upon a design, as was the case with him and Jerome; it’s a matter of variation.  
Variation.  
That’s what makes the whole thing- science- humanity- the world go around, isn’t it?  
If Jeremiah sleeps, he doesn’t notice. In the morning, he finds Bruce sitting at the edge of his bed, fully dressed.  
“Did you sleep?” Jeremiah asks. Does Bruce have to sleep?  
“Yes, I did. Very well. Thank you.”  
He looks at Bruce. He’s aware that he’s staring. Bruce looks back at him, though, placid, indifferent. Empty, maybe.  
“I want to cut your hair,” Jeremiah says, to see what the response will be.  
“You want to make me look more like him.”  
“Yes. Does it bother you?”  
Bruce shrugs. “It’s what I was made for.”  
“But does it bother you?”  
Bruce shrugs again.  
“You only trust me with scissors because you don’t know who I am,” Jeremiah says in the bathroom. It’s a joke, not even a good one, but Bruce replies, “I told you that you can’t hurt me.”  
It’s annoying. Jeremiah frowns. On purpose, he clips Bruce’s ear. Bruce continues looking straight ahead, his posture and breathing undisturbed.  
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Jeremiah says in a tone that is purposely false, but so false that it makes him cringe.  
“What for?”  
“I cut your ear. You’re bleeding.”  
“Oh,” Bruce says.  
Frowning again, Jeremiah catches the blood with a piece of toilet paper. It looks like normal blood. It clots at a normal rate. Turning away from Bruce, Jeremiah touches the tip of his tongue to the blood on the toilet paper, but it’s too little to really taste. He throws the paper into the toilet, and watches the stain spread and wash out.  
“Do you feel anything?” Jeremiah asks.  
“I feel...” Bruce says slowly, “a kind of pressure.”  
“Have you ever felt pain?”  
“I think I have.”  
“You think you have. You don’t remember?”  
“I don’t remember anything before, I suppose, a few years ago. I think it’s been two years since I left Indian Hill. I’m not sure. Sometimes, it seems longer.”  
“How old are you?”  
“How old is Bruce Wayne?”  
“No, how old are you?”  
“A few years, I suppose. They never told me. Maybe I was alive before I remember being alive. There were people in Indian Hill kept in suspended animation. Some of them learned that they’d been dead, and lost their memory. Ms. Mooney had been dead, but somehow, she remembered her life.”  
“This is… Fish Mooney, I take it.” Jeremiah remembers reading her name in the newspapers for years, first in connection with Carmine Falcone’s crime family, and later, in a series of increasingly bizarre stories.  
“Yes. She said that was her name.”  
“That was what happened to Jerome.” Saying it, Jeremiah realizes that this is the first time he’s really thought about it. He’d known intellectually that Jerome had been dead, had been reanimated and mutilated, stitched up in Arkham, but it’s strange, somehow, to think about what it means.  
“Jerome was your brother.”  
Jeremiah frowns. “Yes. You knew that.”  
“I only know what I was told. I never met him. I just saw pictures. I’ve never met someone who has a twin before.”  
“You’re sort of a twin, though. In a way.” It’s not true, but it feels good to say so. It feels spiteful. Whatever might be true about Jeremiah is also true about Bruce. It’s worse. Bruce really is a science experiment. Unnatural. A copy. Something without a will of its own. “Do you feel what he feels?” Jeremiah asks, because it’s the sort of stupid question people used to ask him and Jerome when they were young, with shining eyes and sharp smiles. At the other end of the question was usually a slap to him or Jerome, and an “I guess not” when the other didn’t cry out. In a way, it was fun. Seeing the disappointment in the questioner’s eyes. It was like they were learning for the first time that magic wasn’t real. There was nothing really strange in the world. You were an idiot for believing that there was. It felt good to show people what they were.  
“Do you mean if he gets hurt, do I feel it? How would I know?”  
“I guess you wouldn’t.”  
When he’s finished cutting Bruce’s hair, he brushes off his neck and his forehead, and then, he kisses Bruce. The response he gets is startled, then halting, then soft.  
“You can hit me,” Jeremiah says.  
“Why would I hit you? You’ve been so kind to me.”  
“It’s what he would do.”  
“I’m not him.”  
“You could pretend. It’s what you were made for, after all.”  
Bruce frowns. “Do you want me to hit you?”  
Jeremiah smiles. “Yes.”  
It hurts more than when Bruce did it. Jeremiah didn’t expect that. He can’t steady himself, so he falls against the bathroom wall, hand up to his mouth, tasting blood.  
“I’m sorry,” Bruce gasps, helps him stand up straight.  
“No,” Jeremiah laughs. His head feels like it’s full of humming air, like the air around power lines. “No,” he says softly, and kisses Bruce again, makes sure that Bruce tastes his blood. “Did you feel that?” he asks.  
“It’s not like pain.”  
“No, it isn’t.”  
“It’s… warm.”  
“You’ve probably never kissed anyone before.”  
“No, I have.”  
“Let me guess… the butler did it.”  
“No, not Alfred. Selina.”  
“I should have known,” Jeremiah sighs, “I never get anything that she hasn’t had first.”  
“I don’t think she likes me anymore.”  
“Why’s that?”  
“I pushed her out of a window. She was fine, though,” Bruce adds.  
“Cats have nine lives. She’ll get over it.”  
“I don’t think she will.”  
He caresses Bruce’s cheek. “Well, fuck her, then.” He kisses Bruce. His mouth has started bleeding again. It’s the tooth, not the lip. Once, one of the kids at the circus hit Jerome so hard that it knocked out one of his teeth. It had been loose, anyway, ready to fall out on its own, but no one had known that. The kid and his friends screamed and ran, and Jeremiah and Jerome went home laughing, happy to have something for the Tooth Fairy. Whatever she gave them, they shared. Maybe, when some time has passed, Jeremiah will return to the crypt, and pull out one of Jerome’s teeth. He could take the whole head. It’s preserved, so he could mount it on a wall. He could strip the flesh, and keep the skull. Then, there would only be one person in the world with Jeremiah’s face.  
Not yet, though.  
“I want to see the scars,” Jeremiah says.  
“You saw one of them.”  
“But there are others.”  
“Yes.”  
“Let me see them.” His voice rises at the end of the sentence.  
Bruce nods. “All right.”  
In Jeremiah’s bedroom, Bruce takes off his clothes.  
“I used to have them on my wrists and elbows, my ankles,” Bruce says, “but they got rid of those.”  
“They didn’t think anyone would see the others.” The scars on Bruce’s hips are the worst; neat, but long, raised and milk white.  
“I guess they didn’t,” Bruce says.  
“You said that you were supposed to be dead.” Jeremiah covers the scars with his hands. Aside from Bruce, and the people who made them, no one has seen them but Jeremiah. In a moment, he’ll uncover them and look at them again, but it feels good to hide them, to hide them with his own body.  
“I think I was supposed to have died last year. I think someone was supposed to find me, and take me back to the lab, so that no one would know that I’d replaced Bruce.”  
“Why?”  
“Why, what?”  
“Why did you replace Bruce?”  
“It was very strange.”  
“Probably. These things usually are.”  
“Bruce had to go away, but no one could know that he was gone. Life had to go on. The woman I spoke to, she was called Kathryn, said that I was serving a higher purpose.”  
“And what was this higher purpose?” Jeremiah moves his hands slightly, uncovering the edges of the scars, then concealing them again.  
“I think it had to do with the virus that was released in the city. She used to talk about the city being made pure through impurity.”  
“How did you avoid contracting it?”  
“I don’t know.”  
“Maybe they made you to be immune.”  
“Maybe.”  
“It came from Indian Hill. Like you.”  
“That would make sense.”  
“Kiss me.”  
It’s soft. Jeremiah almost laughs. The other Bruce knew what he was doing. This one doesn’t seem to have a clue, which is fitting. He’s not empty. He’s just blank. He’ll be whatever Jeremiah wants him to be. Then, when the real Bruce comes around, Jeremiah will have a matched set. They’ll be the same, but they’ll be different. One will always be the son of Martha and Thomas Wayne; there’ll always be a part of him, infuriating, tantalizing, that Jeremiah can’t touch. The other will be part of Jeremiah, molded by his will; bending to it in places, and kicking against it in others.  
He pulls Bruce against him, kisses him deeper, harder, hands moving over his skin. He’s already there. His blood is in Bruce’s mouth. It’s blood that Bruce spilt. Jeremiah wounded him, too. He couldn’t taste, but he did ingest. There’s something of Bruce inside of him, too. When he gets on his knees, he doesn’t know what will happen, if Bruce is physiologically normal in this respect. He hesitates. He kisses the scars, runs his tongue across them. Breathes out a thin, cool stream, and watches the skin goosepimple.  
“Do you feel that?”  
“I can feel cold,” Bruce protests.  
“But what else?” He looks up.  
“It’s cold, but it’s warm.”  
“Where?”  
Bruce places his hand low on his belly. “Here.”  
Closing his eyes, Jeremiah smiles. “Good.” Bruce needs to be warmed up. Part of it is probably inexperience, just not knowing what is happening. Part of it, Jeremiah thinks, enjoys thinking, is that the body is still new, unused in this way. It takes some time, but this Bruce reacts like the other one did. It’s the same body, with the same capacity for feeling, if slightly muted, slightly remote. It’s Bruce Wayne’s body, feels like him, but smells of the soap in Jeremiah’s bathroom, was wearing Jeremiah’s clothes. He moves like Bruce. He tastes like Bruce. He even makes the same sounds when he comes.  
Bruce lets Jeremiah kiss him. It occurs to Jeremiah that Bruce may not know what he’s tasting. It should amuse, but it doesn’t, not really. It’s too inescapable a fact to make anyone ashamed. Thinking this, though, makes Jeremiah feel strange; too soft, too exposed. He remembers something, something old, soaked through with the uselessness of history. An inanity.  
A week later, he lost the same tooth as Jerome, and they were identical again.  
He takes off his clothes, eases Bruce back, onto the bed. He asks Bruce to touch him, but he doesn’t push. Sometimes, it’s better to create certain conditions, and then to simply observe. Afterwards, Bruce wraps his arms around him. When he’s not exerting himself, Bruce is cool to the touch. Jeremiah hadn’t noticed it before. His heartbeat is unusually slow. After a reasonable period, Jeremiah will have to physically examine him. Jeremiah’s neither a chemist nor an anatomist, but such things still fascinate him. They’d fascinate anyone.  
It’s better not to push.  
They sleep. Who knows how long they sleep. Unless the lights are on, it’s always dark in the house. Jeremiah likes it better this way. Once, he’d thought of one day walking out into the sunshine, unencumbered by the past. He’d begun imagining it around the time that Jerome killed Lilah. Later, he read about Paul Cicero’s death. He wondered when Jerome learned the truth. Lilah had told Jeremiah before he’d gone to Saint Ignatius. It was Cicero to whom he owed his life, twice over. Meeting the man, though, for the first and last time, Jeremiah had only felt a peculiar coldness. Cicero was part of the circus, and that was already receding in Jeremiah’s mind, becoming literally smaller, until it could fit in the palm of his hand, and he could close his hand around it. Blot it out. For years afterward, Jeremiah had the recurring anxious daydream that Jerome would die, and Jeremiah would be brought back to the circus. After all, Jerome had been the problem. With him dead, Jeremiah would be safe. He could be with his family again. Live the life they’d prepared for him. Jerome had lived, though, thoughtfully not dying until Jeremiah had already established himself. Twice over. So, Jeremiah supposes, he must owe Jerome his life, too. The thought is so unpleasant that it goes back into pleasure. Sometimes, it feels good to feel bad.  
Jeremiah turns onto his side. Bruce is facing away from him. When Jeremiah touches his shoulder, it’s cold. Metabolic differences are inevitable.  
He moves Bruce slightly. Says his name. Perhaps his sleep is deeper than the sleep of an ordinary person. It’s time to wake up, though. Jeremiah is awake.  
Sighing, Jeremiah gets out of bed, turns on the lamp on Bruce’s side.  
Bruce’s eyes are open. The light hits them, and Jeremiah sees that the pupil has overtaken the iris; a spreading stain of black, dumb and incomprehensible, quietly repulsive. There’s a long stream of blood flowing from his nose, flat and dark in the light, a blackish crust ringing each nostril. For a long time- stupidly long- too long- Jeremiah stands there, naked, chilling in the darkness that is broken only by the dome of the lamp’s anemic light, and stares.  
Why can’t you move?  
Why can’t you ever move?  
Why can’t you ever do something?  
Do something!  
Why does everything you love leave you?


End file.
